Obedience

Use in the book

Carrying out divine designs blindly differs from freely obeying commandments. The distinction leaves room for moral agency within providence. Excellence is likewise not reduced to constant self-command: the foremost have commanded themselves to obey what exceeds them. In education, children’s obedience depends on seeing their parents obey a rule in turn. Finally, the compressed assertion that every power springs from some obedience reverses the expected order of explanation. These witnesses make obedience relational. They do not all describe the same institution, and they do not authorize assigning every form of submission the freedom claimed for obeying divine commandments.

Places to read

1. I, p. 226, entry 12, ¶1Divine designs and freely obeyed commandments are distinguished.
2. II, p. 528, entry 2, ¶1Self-command is redirected toward something better than oneself.
3. II, p. 700, entry 10, ¶1Parents’ obedience makes a rule visible to children.
4. II, p. 835, entry 10, ¶1Power is traced back to obedience without specifying an office.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves the repeated verbs and reversals. The foremost renders rank rather than chronological priority. The universal power sentence keeps all, sole and some distinct and names no political office.

Use in the book

The divine law joins righteousness to blessedness by making obedience an enjoyment. This is not the removal of duty but a claim about its content: the commanded love lets the soul participate in goods it would otherwise refuse. Disobedience consequently despises the giver, the duty, and the benefit together.

Redemption intensifies the relation. I.76 thanks Christ for restoring the speaker to the enjoyment and obedience of the laws, then hears the renewed command to love others as Christ has loved. The command is old in its substance but new in the obligation supplied by redemption. Obedience therefore becomes an answering likeness in thought, action, and use of life.

Places to read

1. I.76Redemption restores both enjoyment of the law and obedience to the renewed command of love.
2. II.29Obedience is described as fruition of blessedness, making refusal a many-sided rejection.

In this edition

The phrase enjoyment and obedience does not oppose two separate programmes. It expresses the text’s effort to discover their union in rightly understood law.

Use in the book

Flatland's ruling theory apparently makes obedience a property of correct shape rather than a choice. If Configuration determines conduct, commands cannot be obeyed or resisted through independent will. Yet family life and government continue to require precisely those responses. The resulting inconsistency is enacted rather than merely announced. The narrator's grandson pleads his Perimeter; the grandfather wants him to behave.

The grandfather solves the problem by inventing an unproved bridge between punishment and bodily improvement. Scolding or castigation may have some hidden strengthening effect on Configuration. This conjecture preserves his authority at the cost of his scientific standards. It also shows how an ostensibly material explanation can incorporate conventional moral discipline whenever convenient. The doctrine does not abolish the adult's power to punish; it gives him an additional vocabulary for doing so.

The Circles make the same compromise on a larger scale. In courts they praise and blame; at home they speak passionately of right and wrong. Their practice treats human Figures as capable of choosing, although their teaching rejects that idea. Ordinary moral language persists because relationships require distinctions that the official system cannot supply. Its persistence is especially significant beside the regime's segregation of male and female vocabularies. Words dismissed as emotional fiction in one context return with practical urgency in another.

The command to honour descendants might seem to reverse this hierarchy. A grandfather must honour his grandson because the latter belongs to the ascending chain of bodily development. But the narrator immediately distinguishes honour from indulgence. Adults retain the right to discipline children in the name of their highest interests. Familial submission points in both directions: the older generation must sacrifice for posterity, while the younger must submit to the regimen intended to improve it. The high mortality of surgical promotion gives that regimen its darkest expression.

Political homage operates similarly. Circles are universally honoured as embodiments of superior development, and other classes are asked to subordinate present interests to a promised future. Conformity therefore extends beyond passive acquiescence. It recruits aspiration, self-denial, parental affection, and the language of duty into the maintenance of hierarchy. The book's comic scolding scene reveals the friction between this grand system and a child's ordinary refusal.

Places to read

1. §1223“his disobedience”
2. §1223“a good sound scolding or castigation”
3. §1223“as if they believed”
4. §1223“a reverent regard for their highest interests”
5. §1223“subordinate their own interests”

In this edition

The modern note 114 explains the reversal of the biblical injunction to honour parents. The connection between this reversed command and the disciplinary example is an interpretation of their placement in Abbott's chapter, not an additional law supplied by the editor.

Castigation

Chastisement or punishment. The grandfather conjectures, without evidence, that it may strengthen the child’s Configuration. Printed form: castigation (§ 1223). See Conformity and obedience.

Homage

An expression of submission, loyalty, or reverential respect. Compulsory painting would make every class acknowledge Colour’s authority. Printed form: homage (§ 923). See Conformity and obedience.